Interzone Science Fiction and Fantasy Magazine #223 (25 page)

The season's other comics adaptation,
the meaninglessly titled
Dragonball Evolution
, attempts a live-action Hollywood implementation of Akira Torayama's long-running shonen manga franchise reimagining
Monkey
in a contemporary science-fictional mode. Produced by Stephen Chow, it's less a film for the series’ fans—who as one have keeled over in horror at the quiffy Caucasianising of key cast members—than a genial but largely misguided attempt to capture the bonkers tone, plotting, and action style of this kind of manga using the resources of live-action film, with a laudably rainbow cast studded with quality Asian-American actors performing enthusiastically ludicrous stunts while coloured waves of cg chi explode around them. It's more comfortable with the silly manga stuff than with the interracial high-school romance that has been the price of its own journey to the west, and will probably end up satisfying neither hemisphere. But the dialogue between two radically alien entertainment dialects has a strange fascination of its own, as when Chow-Yun Fat complains “My chi is shrivelling up” as he knocks back a Coke. It's not good for your teeth, either.

Amid these high-profile franchise
relaunches, it's easy to overlook
Race to Witch Mountain
, which aims to restart the generation-old Disney franchise based on the books by Alexander Key (who also seeded the anime
Future Boy Conan
). Though Key's 1968 novel is still credited, the original
Escape to Witch Mountain
book and film are only distantly recognisable in this very free reinvention, which moves the emphasis away from the psychic space orphans’ own quest for their forgotten origin and on to the newly-introduced adult character of Dwayne Johnson's taxi-bound former underworld stunt driver and
Bullitt
fan. With that and the title, it's easy to see where this film is going; and sure enough the kids, though starrily cast with AnnaSophia Robb and
The Dark is Rising
's Alexander Ludwig, take a back seat to the big man's wheelspinning action as they try to outrun the Predator-lite alien dispatched to terminate their asses, while men in black in black cabs with blacked-out windows tag along on the action convoy. Much the best element is the affectionately observed UFO convention around which much of the action runs, and where exobiologists and Starfleet-costumed fans rub shoulders with real-life subcultural celebrities ("Not now, Whitley,” as they chase through the stands) in a utopian vision of mutually alien species united in a common fandom. It's never actually clear what the kids were doing on earth at all in this version; but then it's pitched at an audience that doesn't particularly care.

The same seems true of Night at the Museum 2 (subtitled
Battle of the Smithsonian
in the US), which ramps up the mayhem by shipping Ben Stiller and his teeming cast of historical celebs over to “the biggest museum in the world", where history can come to life in a veritable theme park of museology ("It's actually 21 different museums!") including an art gallery and the National Air & Space Museum. As in the
Shrek
sequels, the original picture book has been left far behind, for a plot strung together entirely out of set-piece tropes that at least respects the single-night setting this time around, but pads it out with a risky new element of protracted comic-on-comic routinelets. Owen Wilson and Steve Coogan continue to shout forlornly at the film from a distance, while the heavy lifting is assigned to new additions to the family like Amy Adams’ insistently perky Amelia Earhart, whose job it is to gush about what a grand adventure it all is, and great American loser George Armstrong Custer, who finds himself granted a chance to erase his failure with the promise that in the future nobody will remember him for anything but being in this movie. ("Right now,
this
is what you're going to be remembered for.
This
is your last stand!") Like the first film, it's full of uneasy contradictions and compromises, viewing traditional museums as inevitable losers in the dash for what Ricky Gervais's character calls “Natural History version 2.0", and only saving the franchise by getting the after-hours nightlife to impersonate state-of-the-art animatronics; while Stiller's poignant lifetime-in-a-night romance with Earhart is rather uncomfortably made up at the end by allowing him a meet-cute with a completely unlike character who merely happens to be played by the same actress. Apparently that's ok.

17 Again applies a
Star Trek
reboot to the body-swap high school genre, as Matthew Perry's midlife divorçant finds himself miraculously recast as Zac Efron and goes back to high school to amend the mistakes that have made his life one big disappointment since he chose up-the-duff girlfriend over basketball stardom and college. “It's a classic transformation story,” advises his Spock-eared geek-oracle friend, consulting a pile of comics: “it appears in the literature time and time again.” But even by the standards of its exhausted genre, this is a startling conservative specimen, with Matt/Zac converting the class to chastity pledges and sorting out his kids’ lives by seeing off his daughter's unsuitable boyfriend and releasing his son's inner sportsman. The original dream of rebooting his own life is discarded early on; the lesson Matt has to learn is that “Everyone's happier with me out of the picture", which on the whole we are, since Efron is surprisingly funny and more convincing than you'd expect. But as the plot adviser notes, “You did your job, and now the hero can move on"—which turns out to be to go back to where he was, only with a newly invigorated sense of resignation and acceptance. Job done.

Similar territory is trodden in the
season's other life-reboot fantasy
Ghosts of Girlfriends Past
, where womanising photographer Matthew McConaughey is treated to a bizarre
Christmas Carol
of his sexual history to demonstrate to him that childhood sweetheart Jennifer Garner is, was, and always will be the one. It must have sounded great at the pitch, before anyone stopped to think the concept through. But even the script has to acknowledge that it falls apart once you move on to the second and third acts: “You're the ghost of girlfriends present? That makes no sense!” And the ghost of girlfriends future is a particularly bizarre figure, played by a Russian model who evidently can't be trusted with any actual lines ("You don't say much, do you?"), and whose mystery identity is a puzzle to which numerous interesting solutions suggest themselves but none is ever offered. Michael Douglas MCs the whole strange pageant as ghost host with the most, the playboy uncle who trained our hero up in his lothario ways, and whose influence has to be shed before he can appreciate that the dead man in all this is himself: “I'm an empty, lonely ghost of a man.” Garner's character gives the film a desperately needed element of warmth and wit, and there's one laugh-out-loud line about grenade launchers. But the film is far too reassuring for comfort about the redemptibility of appalling men by the saintliness of women patient enough to wait for them to grow up.

Much the best of an unusually bulging crop of midlife bloke fantasies is Charlie
Kaufman's
Synecdoche, New York
, which sees Philip Seymour Hoffman as (to quote the Diane Wiest character's convenient summary at her audition to take over his life) “a man already dead, living in a half-world between stasis and antistasis. Time is concentrated and chronology confused for him", as he spends the second half of his disintegrating life rehearsing but never opening a vast unperformable spectacle of his own life (including the production, and the production of the production), losing himself in the mise-en-abîme of representations of representations while the real world slides into a nightmare future seen only in glimpses and fragments. Fans of Kaufman's draft for
A Scanner Darkly
will recognise the source of the surreal temporal dislocations and identity shifts; and if the theme doesn't really support the scale and brilliance of its execution—Woody Allen, after all, has been doing urban Jewish male mortality angst for nigh on forty years—it's still one of the hit-and-miss Kaufman's most audaciously bonkers films, leavening its prevailing self-pity and pathos with moments of startling comedy that come at you out of nowhere with a cosh, and sporting a proud disdain for the shibboleths of conventional Hollywood structure and pacing.